Magic passes from the world. Sort of. They might have to kill Tristam. I really like Sean Russel's characters' non-bloodthirstiness. Made me realise how amoral most fantasy characters are, even the supposedly good ones. His take after Frodo.Like the previous set, left me slightly cool: interested in what was happening, but emotionally unengaged. Although, I did stay up til 4 am reading it... Maybe not so unengaged. Or maybe I was just sleepless.I really liked Kent, and the prince. I would have liked to have seen more of the prince.The sea did have a perfectly good shore. They didn't even have much trouble finding it. And the idea that they'd spend the whole book aboard a boat had put me off reading it for quite a while... Oh well. The boat was OK but I preferred the land scenes, the court, the politics. ( )

Almost from the beginning of this book, I was thinking, "Now the story is *really* getting good." All the ground was laid and the many threads created in the first volume, and at last things really began to move in this second book. I had long spells where I really didn't want to put it down, as the story took another twist or a new character came into play, who you'd thought was involved with one group but turned out to be involved with a different one.

To my great delight, we saw a lot more of Tristam's (the main character's) cousin, Jaimy. In fact he and his fiancee, Alissa, were probably the most realistically-portrayed (and interestingly-portrayed) characters in the book. You got inside them, feeling their emotions, living the story with them.

When we did get back to the main character, off on the distant island, there was the same uneasy feeling that although he was supposed to be experiencing huge emotional upheavals himself, we were observing them from outside rather than being inside his head with him. So although I loved the character, and felt quite bad for him at the end, I could never quite escape the feeling that we were reading ABOUT him, while we were living WITH Jaimy and Alissa.

But what actually happened to Tristam, and to the people back home, was intriguing and complicated. Even though I felt that the "bad guys" were shoved aside a bit too easily before the final intriguing, complicated, and magical stuff happened, I still just couldn't lay the book down till it was all over. So after the rather slow, overly-gradual beginning in the first volume, I felt that the second book redeemed the story considerably. ( )

This dragged and I really didn't care what happened to the characters 8( ( )